The Nazis would have been unthinkable without the First World War, and here, right at the beginning of the story, we see something else: the trauma of defeat left millions of Germans believing a particular narrative about the war not because it was demonstrably true, but because it was emotionally necessary. The nation had been gloriously unified in the sunshine of August 1914, or so most Germans thought. Yet, in the cold rain of November 1918, betrayal and cowardice at home–the “stab in the back”–had brought defeat on the battlefield. Neither part of this narrative was accurate, but the contrast between August and November allowed the Nazis to promise that they would bring back the unity of August once they had defeated the treason of November. What a nation believes about its past is at least as important as what that past actually was.
The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett
In Benjamin Hett’s book on the fall of the Weimar Republic, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Fall of the Weimar Republic, there are eerily familiar echoes between 1930s Germany and the contemporary rise of autocratic power throughout the world, the United States in particular. Hett explicitly acknowledges these similarities, pointing out that in contrast to the “glow” that came with “the end of the Cold War,” he claims that “our time [meaning the time when this book was published, or 2017] more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s.” Although it is almost a cliche to draw parallels between 1930s Germany and the aspirations of Trump and many of extremists on the far right that Trump encourages, there was a a comment that stood out for me in Hett’s analysis. This is the necessity of lies, or as the pull quote above argued for, the role that lies played in the processes that made it possible for the Nazis to come to power and undermine democracy in the process. At the very basis of Nazi power was a big lie, or at the very least a narrative that strays far from the truth but was nonetheless “emotionally necessary.”
As Nietzsche argued, in Beyond Good and Evil, “it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ one could still barely endure–or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified” (§39). In other words, lies are necessary and the question is simply how much lying we need, or how “emotionally necessary” are the narratives we believe in order to stave off the knowledge of existence that would undermine us? It is ironic, given that Nietzsche became (albeit posthumously) the official philosopher of the Nazi party (see this and this), that Nietzsche already pegged Germany for its weakness, and a weaknesses that became more apparent after their defeat in WWI, a defeat that came as a surprise to many who were fed positive news stories on a daily basis. As Nietzsche may well have predicted, to maintain a sense of strength and vitality, they needed a lie, a big lie, and as Hett argues that the narrative of a unified Germany in August 2014, and a “stabbed in the back” Germany in 2018 provided it. As Hett goes on to show throughout his book, the rest is history as Hitler and the Nazis ride this lie to power as they vow to avenge Germany and defeat those who betrayed her, which turned out to be the Social Democratic Party, the party that struggled and ultimately failed to uphold the democratic norms and institutions that held together the Weimar Republic.
This brings me to today. The news media refers constantly to Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him as the “Big LIe.” Polls also indicate that a majority, more than %60 (see this), of Republicans believe this “lie.” The question, however, is whether they really believe the lie or whether the narrative, to cite Hett, is “emotionally necessary” and as such what is important are not the determinate facts but rather the story that upholds their view of the world. Moreover, and to return to Nietzsche, we all need our reality and existence “thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified,” and in a way that affirms our image of ourselves. As Claude Steele shows in his self-affirmation studies, studies further developed by David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen, we often refuse to accept facts not because we are opposed to the truth but more importantly we want what is true to be in support of a sense of self that is, as Steele puts it, “that essentially explains ourselves…[and allows us] to maintain a phenomenal experience of the self – self-conceptions and images – as adaptively and morally adequate, i.e., as competent, good, coherent, unitary, stable, capable of free choice, capable of controlling important outcomes, and so on” (Steele 1988, 262). And what is important in this self-explanation are not the facts, whether true or false, but “a self-system,” or a narrative as I stress this point in my forthcoming book, Towards a Critical Existentialism. It is the narrative as a self-affirming system that is key, and it overrides all the little lies. Hett noted this fact regarding 1930s Weimar Germany when he pointed out that Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, that rather than tell a little lie it is best to tell “the big lie…[for in] the greatness of the lie there is always a certain element of credibility [and] the broad masses of a people can be more easily corrupted in the deeper reaches of their hearts” (cited by Hett, 38). In short, the big lie feeds a core, deep narrative that no determinate facts, by themselves, can touch. The question, then, is how we can assess our narratives, how can we come to measure the strength of our spirit and the extent to which our “emotionally necessary” narratives fail to address the facts? This will be the topic of another post.